Musical Thoughts: Lana Del Rey

February 22, 2012

This week Joe looks at one of the most talked about female singers of the year, Lana Del Rey and asks if we’re perhaps being just a tad too harsh…

I don’t hate Lana Del Rey. Nor do I love her. She sits somewhere on the periphery of my consciousness in the same category as professional sport and Masterchef. I’m sort of aware of her, but can only base my opinions on statements made by other people. And the 30 seconds of the single Video Games I watched on YouTube. Incidentally I didn’t turn it off because I was bored or annoyed. I think I did it because I was scared of enjoying it. Like a homophobe confronted with a beautiful penis.

Lana Del Rey has a name which sounds like it might belong to an American car. She also has the lips of someone who was hit in the mouth by an American car and then denied medical treatment due to a lack of insurance. Which might happen in America.

Lana’s Americana is no accident. Her musical persona gestated in a typically American manner. After her first album didn’t catch in 2010, she was shrewdly cocooned until the blonde Lizzy Grant could push lazily out of her chrysalis as the newly pouting Lana Del Rey. Singing as if in slow motion and dripping bewildered melancholy, she’s a fuck of a lot more interesting than Adele. But I think I admire the artifice of her construction, her brand, more than I value the end product on its own merits.

A lot of people are more than a little perturbed by the adjustments made to her style. But they forget that no one who becomes famous does so by being entirely honest about themselves. Because that would be stupid and arguably impossible.

Every human, famous or not, creates a character for themselves to play, which acts as a distancing device. Some people grow to inhabit that character to a nauseating degree (see Lady Gaga, Ricky Gervais or an aunt). Others are aware of the divide between their persona and their actual self, but equally aware that most fans/acquaintances would find it hard to make such a distinction. This makes it tough to debunk Del Rey for lacking depth because the shallowness of a more typical person is masked only by their obscurity.

In addition to this, the mapping and regurgitating of the movements which lead from nobodyhood to stardom is far easier thanks to the internet, so sudden fame can no longer be accompanied by a falsified back story. The freedom to reinvent yourself is a luxury available only to university students and Jesus.

Imagine it this way: do you think that many years down the line, when Lana is sitting in a nursing home with windsock lips draped lank down her mottled neck, it will matter how cleverly (or cynically) she was presented in the early days of her fame? Look at Madonna, kids, and take notes.

This article is essentially a defence of ambivalence and the celebration of the idea that hating someone because they are loved is a lame and impotent act. Next week: why Bruno Mars is a Doo Wop Dickhead.

Read more of Joe’s musical thoughts here.